New Joinup - Thousands of eGov solutions, just a few seconds away

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In the 6th year of existence, the open platform for sharing and discussing digital administrative solutions has undergone a complete remodelling. The Joinup platform offers IT developers the opportunity to promote, discuss and upload their own proven eGovernment solutions and to download those from others.

"New Joinup is the result of a major restructuring, clean-up and face-lift", explains Hans Vanderbeke, the programme manager in charge of the platform, which is managed under the DIGIT’s ISA² programme. Since its launch in 2011 the platform has seen more than 25 000 subscribers. No fewer than 30 000 artefacts (software solutions, specifications and frameworks) have been uploaded.

"This success, while very much welcome, was not really foreseen", says Vanderbeke. “The platform has grown organically and dynamically. Over the years it became clear that we would need to offer our users some more guidance on how to find the information that was most pertinent to them. We therefore started user surveys, polls and interviews to find out more about the needs and preferences of our users".

New structure of Joinup

Based on this valuable feedback, the structure of the platform was completely revised. The solutions are now grouped under some 88 thematic collections, which allow domain specific discussions on related artefacts. Also, amulti-criteria search is possible now. In the future, solutions of highest relevance will be shown in the search results first. Relevance is defined by timeliness (i.e. newness of information), liveliness (i.e. how much the content item is visited throughout its lifetime) and engagement (i.e. how much the content is used).

New solutions that are proposed for upload will undergo a stricter quality control by the Joinup moderation team posted in the future. In a second step, the owner of the thematic collection for which the solution is proposed also needs to give his/her approval. Moreover, a declaration of the related licence is required for admission to upload from now on. Solutions that were of low interest in the past or that were not properly maintained have been deleted.

Besides information on software, frameworks and artefacts, events and news in relation to these can also be posted on the platform. Discussions with other users are possible and strongly encouraged.

Last but not least, the platform is now made available in responsive mode, allowing for the display of content on all kinds of devices in the proper format.